Exhibition Beacons

FHW are working with technology companies from the Gi-Cluster Innohub Centre to develop a new approach for tracking the location of visitors at venues. Tracking location of visitors indoors was a challenge identified within the EXPERIMEDIA Blue experiment and solving … Continued

FHW are working with technology companies from the Gi-Cluster Innohub Centre to develop a new approach for tracking the location of visitors at venues. Tracking location of visitors indoors was a challenge identified within the EXPERIMEDIA Blue experiment and solving this problem offers huge benefits to venues and visitors.

The aim of the Beacon experiment is to develop a proximity triggered enhanced reality platform for next generation venues, using the iBeacons technology “a new class of low-powered, low-cost transmitters” that can notify nearby smart devices of their presence. In the experiment the application developed will be working on android devices (tablets and smart phones with Android 4.3 l) and not IoS, but the general ambition is to develop a cross-platform application as the Bluetooth 4.0 protocol will be used in all the smart devices in the coming years.

iBeacon uses Bluetooth low energy proximity sensing to transmit a universally unique identifier picked up by the compatible application that the user has already uploaded. The identifier can then be looked up over the internet to determine the device’s physical location and help with the navigation of the venue or the current exhibition and decide that the visitor is in front of a specific exhibit and trigger an action on the device which in this experiment case will be a check-in on social media, resulting on receiving more information on the specific exhibit in the form of multimedia content. The user then can decide to like/comment/share the information on her/his own social media page.

Users are participating on the basis of their consent. Names are collected solely for organizational purposes (return of the devices). No other personal data (pictures, content from the social media) is collected by the experimenter. After the end of the experiment re-log in to the social media account from the devised is not possible.